Speaker: 

Helge Krueger

Institution: 

Caltech

Time: 

Thursday, April 28, 2011 - 2:00pm

Location: 

RH 306

The Ten Martini problem asked to show that the spectrum
of the Almost-Mathieu operator, that is, a Schroedinger operator with potential V (n) = 2 cos(2 pi alpha n), is a Cantor set. In particular, this means that the spectrum does not contain any intervals. The Ten Martini problem was solved in 2009 by Avila and Jitomirskaya. I will show that such a claim is false for the generalization to the potential V(n) =2 cos(2 pi alpha n^2), which is known as skew-shift Schroedinger operator. The proof relies on localization properties of this operator and that the phase space of the skew-shift is two dimensional, whereas it is one dimensional for the rotations underlying the Almost-Mathieu operator.